Burns at the Center of the Universe
by Planet Enchilada
Summary: Originally for a thirty-word prompt thing and this was all I wrote. The Doctor's with Rose Tyler, but some endings are too good to be true.


The first word was Hatred and then I never really got past it due to life. Bitter _italicized __pronouns_ means Our Doctor, Proper Doctor, not Pete's World Doctor.

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**Hatred.**

Sometimes he woke up with drums pounding in his head, splitting up his skull so that memories that were his and weren't his seeped in to swirl toxically through Rose's face and the little house in the country and the nameplate on the desk which read _John Smith_. He'd be unable to breathe, a vise of sandwiched lost recollections twisting away at his heart and he'd usually cry, loudly at first but more quietly and hopelessly when he realized that the cottage wasn't in the TARDIS wasn't in space wasn't in his universe. The first couple times it had happened, a month or two after the wedding of the Tylers' dreams, it woke Rose and she was frightened because he was frightened. But familiarity breeds contempt and now she just mumbled and rolled over, hugging her pillow tight because she couldn't touch him, not when he was shaking like that.

"Doctor," he imagined she'd be thinking. "He's doing it again.**  
**

_He isn't you._

_You left me again, you left me with him._

_Did you think I could be satisfied with _this_ when I had you?_

He couldn't expect her to be. John Smith. What kind of name was John Smith? Had he thought it was cute? John Smith. Rose wanted a Doctor, she wanted the man spreadiing flamboyance across the galaxies, not a John Smith, not the man trying to do that with only a tiny office cubicle to work with and the man being told off like a child for hacking the computer system to tell everyone a joke on logging in. She didn't want the man who wanted what she wanted but was stuck in a nine-to-five job and a small car during rush hour and who couldn't live in the city because he had strange anxiety attacks at landmarks recognized from a life he'd never had.

That happened frquently before they got out of London. The first time had been a hospital, noting special that Rose could remember. They were just walking past, laughing about some silly thing in the newspaper, when he looked at the sign. And up at the top. And he stopped breathing. One heart missed its mark and the other wasn't there to pick up where it left off and he wasn't prepared for it.

When he came around Rose understood. Sort of. She stroked his hair and looked sympathetic and asked what he'd remembered.

"Martha," he'd told her seriously. "I remembered Martha." Rose was not pleased.

It wasn't like remembering Martha when he'd glance up from his computer at work because someone was making a sharp-witted indignant remark at the water cooler. He could remember the hospital without incident then. But then it was real and in front of him and not real at all. It existed all at once but it didn't exist and it had never happened because he hadn't been there and if there was even a Martha here he certainly couldn't seek her out because knowing her while she didn't know him would be even more difficult than ignoring it all. It was too much, too much for him.

People didn't think there was much of anything too much for John Smith. He was loud, he was occasionally antagonistic, and he was clever, oh, he was cleverer than any of them and they knew it and it scared them.

"He could go places," they'd say, but he couldn't. Couldn't go anywhere without a TARDIS, still a Timelord at single heart. Couldn't move up in this world because moving up meant more to do and more to do meant more to see and more to see meant more to learn and more to learn meant more to _remember_ and more to _remember_ made his head burn from the inside out and he'd go ashen and sweaty and ask to go home early and holler at people in traffic and try not to cry before it was dark and quiet and Rose wouldn't hear because he'd warned her.

_He'd_ warned her.

Born in battle, _he'd_ said. Full of blood, full of anger, full of revenge. Love him, _he'd_ said. Love him and fix him like you fixed me. Well, maybe Rose Tyler had fixed _him_ but he wasn't _him_ anymore and Rose had loved _him_ and who was _he_ to say he knew better, after all? _His _friends were willing to destroy their planet for _him_. Not John Smith, not a meta-crisis who should never have happened but had to. Someone with armies prepared to annihilate themselves for him should not find himself morally superior to someone who exterminated the enemy on his own conscience. But no, Rose listened to _him_, _he_ had to know much better because _he_ was the Doctor, her Doctor. And so when John Smith looked straight at the London Eye instead of glancing up briefly as he always had and was rushed to another hospital, he _remembered _when another man who had been him but had never been him had found Rose and life became brighter. And that was too much, too, because they both remembered it but it never happened and as far as Rose was concerned, it wasn't _him_, the one who had been there, who was lying pale against a hospital bed again. It was somebody new, somebody from the journey's end, who'd hopped on board just as the ride was over. He hadn't been there. That was the worst part, he thought.

And so he woke up in the dark crying from the pain in his head because he'd been there but he hadn't and there wasn't any there to have been because it was all across the void where _he_ was. _He_ didn't have Rose but that was all _he_ didn't have. _He _had the memories like iron burns on his mind, raw and charred and retaining their shape. _He_ had the places to go and if the sudden rush of phantom energy made his heart skip a beat it didn't matter. _He_ had Martha and Donna and Wilfred and Sarah Jane and Jack and even Mickey now. _He_ had the TARDIS, his TARDIS, _his_ TARDIS. Was Rose really worth _everything_? _He_ seemed to think so, seemed to think she was worth it all to him but he wasn't _him_ and there were circumstances, you see. He loved Rose, loved Rose like he always had and she loved him but she loved _him_, too, and she remembered that it when he was _him_ he'd never shouted "OI!" when the postman bumped into him.

So did he hate him? Did he hate _him_ for doing it, doing what he knew he'd do, too, and leave them stranded with only their hearts' desire for condolence? Did he hate _him_ for having everything else and being what Rose had fallen in love with in the first place even if he was the same plus a carefully heeded warning? Maybe he resented that, the warning, the vague alienation it had resulted in, but he couldn't hate it. If he hated _him_ then he hated himself. It was overwhelming. But that was all. He hadn't been the bane of his own existence, even if there were only a few people in the universe he hated more than himself.

But none of them were in this universe, were they?

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Reviews are bow ties.

And bow ties are cool.


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